#binding arbitration

Indeed may have set up the turbo version of that. While this is a very "I am not a lawyer" post, I am someone who watches consumer rights (in the US) with great interest. I'd like to be told I'm very wrong, but...

"arising out of or relating in any way to the Site or your interactions with it, any communications you send or receive, any programs or services used, provided, sold, or distributed through the Site, the Terms or prior versions of the Terms, or any aspect of your relationship with Indeed (each, an “Arbitration Dispute”), between you and Indeed or between you and any other User, will be resolved by binding arbitration"

"As set out in the prior paragraph, this Arbitration Agreement requires you to arbitrate not only Arbitration Disputes between you and Indeed but also Arbitration Disputes between you and any other User. Additionally, this Arbitration Agreement is expressly intended to bind any third-party beneficiary of this Arbitration Agreement to the greatest extent possible under applicable law."

Ideally (not good but not atypical) this would prevent lawsuits between job seekers and companies but minimal context is involved. Rather, the agreement specifies itself to be as broadly as it can possibly be applied.

Would it stand up in court for a company to say you can't sue them because they're also Indeed users? Hopefully not. Will an unethical company attempt it? You better believe it.

You can opt out and should do so immediately.

"you may opt out of this Arbitration Agreement for your Job Seeker account(s) by sending a written opt-out notice (“Opt-Out Notice”) to Indeed. To be effective, you must send your Opt-Out Notice within 30 days after first accepting Terms that contain this Arbitration Agreement and you must use one of the following two methods: (1) complete the Opt-Out Notice form by providing all information required on the form and email it to [email protected]; or (2) send an email to [email protected] that includes, in the following order, (a) a statement that “I am writing to provide notice that I’m opting out of the Arbitration Agreement in Indeed’s Terms of Service”, (b) your full name, (c) your mailing address, (d) your phone number, (e) all email address(es) associated with the Job Seeker account(s) for which you are opting out, and (f) the date of your Opt-Out Notice. You must send your Opt-Out Notice from an email address associated with a Job Seeker account that belongs to you and for which you are opting out."

I believe it's also very telling to note that they have a job-seeker opt-out, but not employer. One side benefits tremendously from this (as is always the case with binding arbitration), so much so that they don't see any need to provide the option at all, and it's not the individual.

For all my fellow Tumblrites out there (second verse, same as the first):

The first thing you should do when you read any contract is look for language that specifies arbitration of any disputes between you and the company.

The second thing you should immediately do is look for the opt-out language in the same section of the contract.

The third thing is follow those processes to opt-out and keep a record of you notifying the company that you are opting out of the arbitration language per the agreement as agreed to on (date). And keep a copy of that agreement as well! Companies like to try and sneak unilateral changes past people and state that continued use of the product or service constitutes acceptance.

Protect your legal rights!

The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.

Just as Martin Niemöller's "First They Came" has become our framework for understanding the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, so, too is Wilhoit's Law the best way to understand America's decline into fascism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

In case you're not familiar with Frank Wilhoit's amazing law, here it is:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

The thing that makes Wilhoit's Law so apt to this moment – and to our understanding of the recent history that produced this moment – is how it connects the petty with the terrifying, the trivial with the radical, the micro with the macro. It's a way to join the dots between fascists' business dealings, their interpersonal relationships, and their political views. It describes a continuum that ranges from minor commercial grifts to martial law, and shows how tolerance for the former creates the conditions for the latter.

The gross ways in which Wilhoit's Law applies are easy to understand. The dollar value of corporate wage-theft far outstrips the total dollars lost to all other forms of property crime, and yet there is virtually no enforcement against bosses who steal their workers' paychecks, while petty property crimes can result in long prison sentences (depending on your skin color and/or bank balance):

https://www.opportunityinstitute.org/blog/post/organized-retail-theft-wage-theft/

Elon Musk values "free speech" and insists on his right to brand innocent people as "pedos," but he also wants the courts to destroy organizations that publish their opinions about his shitty business practices:

https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk

Fascists turn crybaby when they're imprisoned for attempting a murderous coup, but buy merch celebrating the construction of domestic concentration camps where people are locked up without trial:

https://officialalligatoralcatraz.com/shop

That stuff is all easy to see, but I want to draw a line between these gross violations of Wilhoit's Law and pettier practices that have been creating the conditions for the present day Wilhoit Dystopia.

Take terms of service. The Federalist Society – whose law library could save a lot of space by throwing away all its books and replacing them with a framed copy of Wilhoit's Law – has long held that merely glancing at a web-page or traversing the doorway of a shop is all it takes for you to enter into a "contract" by which you surrender all of your rights. Every major corporation – and many smaller ones – now routinely seek to bind both workers and customers to garbage-novellas of onerous, unreadable legal conditions.

I’m coming to GUELPH, ONTARIO THIS FRIDAY (May 8) to deliver the Musagetes Lecture.

One of my bedrock beliefs is that capitalists really hate capitalism. They may name their beloved institutes after the likes of Adam Smith, but they ignore everything Smith had to say about the necessity of competition to keep markets from turning into monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/commissar-merck/#price-giver

The theory of capitalism holds that markets are a kind of distributed computer that aggregates trillions of decisions from billions of market participants in order to optimize production and distribution of goods and services, creating a "Pareto-optimal" world where no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

Whether or not you believe that this computer exists and functions as predicted, one indisputable fact about it is that it requires the freedom to choose in order to work. The point of market-as-computer is that it aggregates decisions, so it can only work if everyone is as free as possible to decide.

But that's not the world capitalists want. For capitalists, the point is to restrict other people's choices in order to maximize your own freedom. That's how we get economic doctrines like "revealed preferences": the idea that if a person says they want one thing, but does another thing, then you can tell what they really prefer by looking at the latter and disregarding the former. This is the kind of doctrine you can only fully embrace after sustaining the kind of highly specific neurological injury that is induced by taking an economics degree, an injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. Under the doctrine of revealed preferences, someone who sells their kidney to make the rent has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

Capitalism is supposed to run on risk: the risk of being overtaken by a competitor drives businesses to deliver better services more efficiently, thus producing a bounty for all. But capitalists really hate risk, hence the drive to monopoly: Mark Zuckerberg admitted, in writing, that he only bought Instagram so that he wouldn't have to compete with it ("It is better to buy than to compete" -M. Zuckerberg):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here

Capitalists hate capitalism, but they love feudalism. Feudalism is like capitalism, in that you have a ruling class that creams off the surplus generated by labor; but under feudalism, society is organized to protect rents (money you get from owning stuff) over profits (money you get from doing stuff). The beauty of rents is that they are insulated from risk: if you own a coffee shop, you're in constant danger of being put out of business by a better coffee shop. But if you own the building and your coffee shop tenant goes under, well, you've still got the building, and hey, now it's on the same hot block as the amazing new cafe that's driving its competitors out of business:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Douglas Rushkoff calls this "going meta": don't drive a taxi, rent a medallion to a taxi driver. Don't rent a medallion, start a ride-hailing app company. Don't start a ride-hailing company, invest in the company. Don't invest in the company, but options on the company's shares. Each layer of indirection takes you further from the delivery of a useful service – and insulates you further from risk:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Monopoly is to capitalism as gerrymandering is to democracy, a way to strip out any meaningful choice. Think of the two giant packaged goods companies that fill your grocery aisles: Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Practically everything on your grocer's shelves is made by a division of one of these two massive conglomerates. If you try to "vote with your wallet" by buying a low-packaging version of a product, it's going to be sold to you by the same company that sells the high-packaging version. If you switch to an artisanal brand of cookies made by a local family business, Unilever or P&G will buy that company and issue a press release declaring that they made the acquisition because they know "their customers value choice":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/18/market-discipline/#too-big-to-care

Gerrymandering strips your vote of any impact on political outcomes. Monopoly strips your purchases of any ability to influence economic outcomes. Wrap both of them in "revealed preferences" and you get a system that endlessly narrates its ability to deliver choice, and then blames your misery on your having chosen badly.

This is the method of the entire conservative project. As Dan Savage says: the thing that unites conservative assaults on voting, birth control, abortion and no-fault divorce is the stripping away of choice. Conservatives are trying to create a world populated by husbands you can't divorce, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, and politicians you can't vote out of office. Add to that Trump's assault on the National Labor Relations Board, his reversal of the FTC's ban on noncompetes, and his protection of "TRAP" agreements that force employees to pay thousands of dollars if they quit their jobs, and you get "jobs you can't quit":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

Conservative strongmen like Trump and Musk exalt the value of self-determination – for themselves, at everyone else's expense. Trump's ability to stiff the contractors that built his hotels and Musk's ability to rain flaming rocket debris down on the people who live near his company town require that everyone else be stripped of protections. They get to determine their own course in life by taking away your ability to determine your own. Their right to swing their fists ends two inches past your nose:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/21/torment-nexusism/#marching-to-pretoria

Cheaters and bullies hate the rule of law, hence Trump's endless repetition of Nixon's mantra: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." But not everyone can be president, and the world is full of would-be Trumps in positions of power who would like to be able to commit crimes without fear of legal repercussions. For these people, we have something called "binding arbitration."

"Binding arbitration" is a widely used contractual term that forces you to surrender your right to sue a company that wrongs you. Instead of suing, binding arbitration forces you to take your case to an "arbitrator"; that is, a lawyer who is paid by the company that cheated you or maimed you or killed your loved one. The arbitrator decides whether their client is guilty, and, if so, how much that client owes you. The entire process is confidential and it is non-precedential, meaning that if a company rips off millions of people in the same way, each of them has to arbitrate their claims separately, and people who are successful can't share their tactical notes with the people who are next in line to plead for justice.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky. As much as I trust and respect the Bluesky executives and board members I am acquainted with, I believe the service itself is insufficiently enshittification-resistant to trust:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

I've met Bluesky's CEO Jay Graber on a few occasions and heard her speak several times and I'm hugely impressed with her documented commitment to make "enshittification-resistant" social media:

https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/

Some of Bluesky's most innovative and well-developed features are extremely enshittification-resistant, like "composable moderation," which gives users an extraordinary degree of control over their feeds, which means that the service's owners can't readily dial down the amount of desirable information in those feeds in order to create space for ads or posts that someone has paid to boost (or, as is the case with Twitter, the personal maunderings of the service's boss and whichever esoteric fascist crony talked to him last):

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

What's more, this composable moderation, along with an open API for clients, allows Bluesky (the company) to adhere to its legal obligations to block content, while allowing Bluesky users to sidestep those blocks. For example, Bluesky has a labeling service that flags content that has to be blocked under Turkey's system of authoritarian censorship, and, by default, the Bluesky client blocks anything with that flag for Turkish users. But users can turn off that block, and/or use an alternative Bluesky client that doesn't pay attention to the blocked-in-Turkey flag.

Same goes for the new British system of mass censorship under the Online Safety Act: Bluesky the company will do an age-verification process with users of its official client (like all age verification, this system is janky and it sucks), but UK users who choose a different client (one that isn't worried about being sanctioned by the UK government) can access all of Bluesky without any age verification.

But the key anti-enshittification measure – federation – has lagged on Bluesky. For most of Bluesky's history, it's been impossible to participate in the Bluesky service without being a Bluesky user, because the most critical parts of the Bluesky network were incredibly expensive to operate (tens of millions of dollars per year), and lacked any tooling to make it easy to create independent, federated servers.

Without the ability to participate on the Bluesky network without having to create an account with Bluesky (the company), users would have to subject themselves to Bluesky's terms of service, and could have their access to the Bluesky network unilaterally terminated by Bluesky (the company).

Now, I happen to think pretty highly of the management of Bluesky (the company) at the moment. But Bluesky has outside investors – the distressingly stupid- and sinister-sounding Blockchain Capital – and if these people get it into their heads to enshittify Bluesky, then can force good actors off the board of directors, fire the management, and replace them with standard-issue corporate sociopaths.

What's more, the fact that users are hostage to Bluesky – that they have no way to part ways with the company without parting ways with the people they value on the service – means that new management can torment Bluesky users with impunity, so long as these torments are kept to a level such that Bluesky users hate the company less than they love one another.

By contrast, with federation – the ability to part ways with the Bluesky company without losing access to the service – investors might understand that if they turn the screws on users, those users will find it trivial to leave the company's servers, because doing so won't cost them access to the service. And if the investors don't understand this, well, users can leave – without enduring any switching costs.

The good news here is that Bluesky has made enormous progress in true federation. The cost of operating a full Bluesky stack has fallen from tens of millions of dollars per year to tens of dollars per month:

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l

This is an extremely welcome development and it goes a long way toward enshittification-proofing the Bluesky service, and some way to enshittification-proofing Bluesky, the company.

But Bluesky, the company, still needs serious work.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire

I don't know if you've heard, but water has started running uphill – I mean, speaking in a politico-scientific sense:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

By which I mean, the bedrock consensus of political science appears to have been disproved. Broadly speaking, political scientists believe that lawmakers and regulators only respond to the policy preferences of powerful people. If economic elites want a policy, that's the policy we get – no matter how unpopular it is with everyone else. Likewise, even if something is very, very popular with all of us, we won't get it if the super-rich hate it.

Just take a look at the gap between public opinion and policy outcomes: most people think "capitalism does more harm than good"; most Canadians, Britons and Australians aged 18-34 think "socialism will improve the economy and well-being of citizens"; 72% of Brits support a national job guarantee; the majority of Californians support permanent rent-controls; and most people in 40 countries want CEO salaries capped at 4X that of their lowest-paid employees:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

The inability of the public to get its way isn't just an impressionistic view – it's an empirical finding, based on a representative sample of 1,779 policy outcomes, that politicians ignore the will of the people in favor of the will of billionaires:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

And yet, all over the world, we're seeing these irrepressible outbreaks of antitrust policy, aimed squarely at shattering corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

That was 3 days ago. I was just getting ready to drive over and he texted me this, then called me and told me he wouldn't treat me because being asked about his paperwork "made him uncomfortable."

I guess from now on I just go to the first appointment, read the paperwork and if it's objectionable, cancel and walk out?

Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.

This is the 2^5th instance on which I find myself confronting a Saturday morning on which I have a zillion links that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, occasioning a linkdump post; here are the previous 31 installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I like to start these with good news, which is often hard to find these days, but here's something genuinely cool: an aerogel that can desalinate salt water using only radiant solar energy for power:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/this-aerogel-and-some-sun-could-make-saltwater-drinkable/

Aerogels are ultralight materials made of carbon nanotubes; they're incredibly cheap to manufacture in bulk, and each one can have different properties, depending on the deposition and geometry of the 'tubes. The tech is described by Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Xi Shen in ACS Energy Letters:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.5c01233?ref=pdf

You put the gel in some salt water (which can also be contaminated with pathogens, apparently) and it acts as a porous evaporator, causing pure water vapor to rise out of the mass, which can be condensed and drunk. It's not clear how many times you can do this with a given aerogel, but it's exciting stuff.

Moving from aerogel to air travel: an Air Canada passenger named Linda Royle was forced to check her carry-on on a stopover in Toronto. Someone stole her bag and Air Canada refused to compensate her for it (they disqualified her because she couldn't provide original receipts for the shoes she'd bought five years previously). That's frustrating, of course, but what happened next is a lot weirder: she got a call from a pharmacist in St John's, Newfoundland who had been entrusted with her missing bag by Air Canada, on the grounds that they didn't know who it belonged to, and they thought the pharmacist could use the labels on her prescription meds to track her down.

That's not even the weird part! When Linda Royle recovered her bag, she discovered that someone had stolen a bunch of stuff out of it, and replaced it toilet bags belonging to two strangers, a knife, and an Air Canada ticket scanner:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/air-canada-mystery-baggage-1.7592756

After this hit the news, Air Canada suddenly discovered that it was allowed to reimburse her for her stolen stuff even though she hadn't saved all her receipts. This is all about par for the course with Air Canada, an airline that is violently allergic to both checked baggage and customer service.

Air Canada is the airline that was discovered to have a warehouse full of "lost" bags next to Toronto Pearson Airport, none of which they bothered to reunite passengers with, donating the bags to local charities instead:

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/air-canada-passengers-complain-lost-144243835.html

Despite this, the airline registered very few customer complaints. That's because they've fired so many of their customer service reps and replaced them with AI chatbots whose florid "hallucinations" give fliers all kinds of wrong advice, which Air Canada refuses to make up for unless passengers pursue them through several rounds of appeal and then escalate to a government ombudsman:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/

Can't register complaints if you fire all the customer service reps and replace them with malfing dogshit chatbots, amirite?

But you don't have to fire all your customer service reps or invest in chatbots to create an all-consuming accountability sink that can absorb all the risk you create by screwing over your customers. The easiest way to do that is to stick a "binding arbitration" waiver in your terms of service that takes away your customer's right to sue, no matter how much harm you inflict on them.

It's getting harder and harder to move through the world without surrendering your legal rights these days. I've had to walk away from doctors, dentists, taxi companies, solar installers, and car rental companies because they wanted me to click away my right to sue as a condition of doing business with them. What's the point of a system of civil justice if everyone in a position to harm you can force you to swear off using it?

It would be different if arbitration was fair, but "he who pays the piper calls the tune" – that is, arbitrators almost always rule in favor of the corporation that's paying them, no matter how they've screwed over the other party. There are a few exceptions, but things have to be really egregious for this to be the case – as with the Fox show Bones, whose cast were so utterly screwed by Fox that the arbitrator awarded them $179m, issuing a scathing ruling that called out individual Fox execs for their scumbag conduct:

https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/fox-bones-arbitration-emily-deschanel-179-million-1203150879/

But while the corporate-friendly judiciary has a long history of forcing everyday people into arbitration when they get maimed or cheated by a capitalist enterprise, these same judges are always happy to set aside arbitrator's judgements when they go in favor of the little guy, which is exactly what happened with Bones:

https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/bones-arbitration-against-fox-1203200504/

That wasn't the last judge to experience a sudden attack of skepticism for arbitrators' decisions in the face of an adverse outcome for some corporate scumbag. This week, the Eight Circuit overturned a $5m arbitration award that Mike "Mypillow" Lindell was ordered to pay after he lost a bet about whether the 2020 election was stolen:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/07/arbitration-for-thee-but-not-for-mike-lindell.html

Lindell offered $5m to anyone who could prove the 2020 election wasn't stolen. A software developer named Robert Zeidman analyzed the voting machine logs that Lindell used as the basis for his claims and showed that Lindell was full of shit. An arbitrator agreed, and ordered Lindell to pay $5m.

The Eight Circuit, meanwhile, decided that the arbitrator "exceeded their powers" and set aside the award. As Credit Slips' Bob Lawless writes, it would be nice if this meant that the next time you were hurt by a dentist, a doctor, a solar installer, a rental car agency, or a taxi company, you could get out of arbitration, but he's not holding his breath: "Something tells me, however, that might not be the case in a more routine consumer dispute."

The house always wins. That's true even when the player is trying to build a casino! In her latest newsletter, Ann Pettifor writes about how "Capitalism Devours Crypto":

https://annpettifor.substack.com/p/capitalism-devours-crypto

Pettifor's writing about the institutional formalization of "Stablecoins," a form of wildcat money that is a modern update of the "narrow bank" notes that triggered a series of financial panics in the 1830s, wiping out a sizable fraction of the US economy. The GENIUS Act, which brings Stablecoins into a legal framework, has helped inflate a crypto bubble worth $4t.

Key to this bubble is to make crypto into a form of government-backed (but only barely regulated) asset, with one of the primary beneficiaries being World Liberty Financial, a company owned by the President of the United States. Other beneficiaries include Michael Saylor's "Strategy" (formerly Microstrategy), whose actual strategy is to sell shares and bonds to buy bitcoin, then use the rising price of bitcoin to issue more paper that it can use to buy more bitcoin, and so on. This is exactly how the South Sea Company ran its operation, leading to yet another global financial cataclysm:

https://www.ft.com/content/45d7c547-f686-4162-bfc3-56d609003bbb

A technology regulated by the US government and heavily manipulated by the US president is the polar opposite of the libertarian rhetoric in Satoshi's original bitcoin white paper, which bitcoin bros cite as gospel when explaining how they're doing something truly different this time.

Pettifor says that crypto is different from Beanie Babies and other bubbles – because this time, the president is in on the scam.

Speaking of the crypto bubble, one striking feature of this bubble is how many of its key players are also involved in pumping up the AI bubble. The AI bubble is a different kind of sleaze from the crypto bubble, but it's every bit as sleazy.

Ever since Openai and Trump's splashy announcement of the $500b "Stargate" plan to build AI data-centers, Ed Zitron, one of the great tech debullshitifiers, has been taking pointed notice of just how vaporous this plan is. In his latest investigation, Zitron shows how the supine tech press has played credulous stenographer to Sam Altman and Softbank in helping to sell a clearly bogus claim about Softbank's investment in Stargate:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/softbank-openai/

Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Bloomberg on down took Sam Altman at his word when he claimed that a new data-center in Abilene, TX was a) part of Stargate, and b) funded by Softbank.

The thing is, neither of these are true. As confirmed by the data-center's own developers, "Softbank is not and has not been involved in the funding for its construction." Softbank is the exclusive trademark holder for Stargate, and Stargate has no legal entity apart from this trademark, so this data-center is not part of Stargate, despite widespread press coverage to the contrary.

What's more, there are no other data-centers on the horizon that are part of Stargate. Which is to say that Stargate, the $500b AI data center program, doesn't actually exist.

Zitron:

Stargate does not exist other than as a name that Sam Altman gives things to make them feel more special than they are, and SoftBank was never involved. Stargate does not exist as reported.

One of the reasons I love Zitron's work so much is that he actually really likes technology and aspires to a world where the promise of technology as a force for human thriving and betterment can be realized. That's what animates me, too, which is why I was so excited to read "Designing Sousveillance Tools for Gig Workers," a paper by a group of computer scientists who worked closely with gig workers to create a design framework for technology that helps workers get the upper hand over their bosses:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.09986

The researcher describe a radical, careful methodology grounded in co-creation, led by the users – the workers – in dialog with the tech experts. The paper's preamble, which sets out the concept of "ethics of care" is almost as interesting as the recommendations that the workers and researchers create together.

One of those researchers is Saiph Savage, who is the co-organizer of next week's ACM Collective Intelligence conference in San Diego, where I'm giving the evening keynote on Aug 5:

https://ci.acm.org/2025/speakers/cory-doctorow/

And speaking of a) great tech events and b) an ethic of care, everyone who can get to New York from Aug 15-17 should absolutely plan on attending Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in Queen's. HOPE is one of the oldest hacker cons in the world, organized by the 2600 Magazine folks, and it is human-scaled, human-centric, and dedicated to liberation through technology.

HOPE has just announced a bunch of student scholarships, so if you're not able to come up with the door fee (or the heavily discounted streaming-only ticket), HOPE is still something you can do!

https://www.2600.com/content/hope-updates-more-speakers-and-student-scholarships

One of the things I adore about hacker cons is the way they embody the hacker ethic that every 10 foot wall that some stupid corporation builds around your tech should be met with an 11 foot ladder. The ability of technologists to disenshittify the tools we love is key to resisting enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/23/resto-modding/#itch-scratchers-r-us

Here's a 10 foot wall that I'd love to see comprehensively scaled: Eschelon, maker of "smart" home gym equipment, just remote-fucked all of the hardware its customers had purchased by pushing out a software downgrade:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/firmware-update-hinders-echelon-smart-home-gym-equipments-ability-to-work-offline/

The downgrade breaks compatibility with apps like QZ, which allow you to connect your Eschelon gear to third-party services like Zwift, which "shows people virtual, scenic worlds while they’re exercising." QZ also lets Eschelon owners make their workouts better in other ways, like automating resistance adjustments.

By blocking QZ, Eschelon can force its customers to sign up for its own, inferior $40/month service. When companies pull scams like this, they often claim that they need to do so in order to remain in business, but here's some even worse news: thanks to the new software that Eschelon just forced into its customers' devices, these devices will no longer be able to run at all if Eschelon goes out of business. This is a bad design under any circumstances, but when deployed by a company that is sufficiently desperate to rug its customers in this way, it's a dismal sign indeed. At this point, you'd have to be pretty gullible to buy a new Eschelon device, given the strong likelihood that both the company and its products are headed for the scrapheap.

This is classic enshittification, of course, a subject I'm so obsessed with that I've written an entire book about it, which drops on October 7:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

The early reviews are rolling in for the book now, starting with Booklist:

This is Doctorow in full-on angry author mode; he pulls no punches here, naming names and calling out guilty parties . . . Readers will be upset, informed, and inflamed.

Not to be outdone, Publishers Weekly writes:

A razor-sharp yet subtly optimistic look at the soul-sucking state of the internet.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780374619329

Meanwhile, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman writes,

Cory Doctorow’s neologism was an instant hit, neatly encapsulating the public’s growing disappointment, sometimes bordering on rage, with what was happening to internet platforms. His pithy summary of the process was also brilliant.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=277517&post_id=169092636&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=444vl&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

I'm heading out on tour with this one in October, hitting the US (Seattle, Boston, DC, NYC, NOLA, Chicago, LA, PDX, Miami and Madison, CT), Canada (Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto); and the UK (London, Hay, and possibly Glasgow).

With all that travel on the horizon, it's time to draw this linkdump to a close, but I'll leave you with a couple of lighter stories as palette-cleansers. First, there's "Smothered," a documentary about the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers streaming free at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/smothered-the-censorship-struggles-of-the-smothers-brothers-comedy-hour-2002

The Smothers Brothers were a musical comedy act who worked savage political commentary into their act, and when they refused to pull their punches, CBS's president canceled their show, for fear of pissing off Richard Nixon, a thin-skinned, authoritarian, dishonest vindictive Republican president. What I'm getting at here, is that Colbert is in good company.

Here's a couple of my favorite Smothers Brothers bits: first, the classic "Mom Always Liked You Best," which my Dad used to recite all the time when I was growing up, until we could all hit the line "Bark, chicken, bark" at the drop of a hat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXH_hFqBPCs

And then there's "Chirp Goes the Nightingale," which my daughter and I used to sing at bedtime after I read her a story, which would reduce us to tears of laughter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ1NfuHphOw

Finally, as a little digestif, please enjoy this article by Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner on the miracle of modern Iranian brickwork, one of the most exciting new developments in architecture of this century (notwithstanding that the US is determined to bomb it all into rubble):

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/iranian-brick-architecture/

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: